In a postwar Europe brutalised by slaughter, shows this compelling study of life after 1945, everyone had somebody to hate

Slideshow: Savage Continent

A French collaborator gets a beating after the liberation of Rennes, August 1944 (Bob Landry)

F
or obvious reasons, most accounts of the second world war end in May 1945.
Hitler was dead, his empire was shattered and his capital was in ruins. In
Britain we remember this as a supreme moment of vindication and joy, while
the Germans call it “Zero Hour”, when “the slate was wiped clean and
­history could begin again”. But was it? Not according to the historian
Keith Lowe. For tens of millions of people, he argues, VE Day marked not the
end of a bad dream, but the end of one nightmare and the beginning of
another. In central Europe, the iron curtain was already descending; even in
the West, the rituals of recrimination were being played out. And for many
people, Lowe writes, May 1945 marked not the beginning of a brave new era
but a “descent into anarchy”. This was a frightening world of vengeance and
violence, rape